Monthly Archives: October 2014

One of my projects these days is MOOCery. MOOCs are Massive Open Online Courses- courses offered for free online, and open to everyone. The formats these courses take will vary, but they often include lectures on video, discussion forums, and assignments. I’m working on two courses right now, and it was very tempting to sign up for more.

The New: Demystifying the Valley of Confusion

Geological map of the Valley of Confusion

First-year geology students are asked to do a very complex task: view a two-dimensional representation of the intersection of a complex geometric surface with three-dimensional subsurface structures (also called a geological map), and understand what the heck they are looking at.

Here’s an example of a simplified geological map. In this image, the coloured patches represent different rock layers that you would see if you could strip away all of the soil and expose the rocks beneath. If I were to ask you how those rock layers were arranged within the Earth, you might say that they were folded. It certainly looks that way. In fact, they are not folded at all. They are in flat layers, all tilting to the east at an angle of 30 degrees. Students are expected to arrive at that interpretation by looking at maps like this one.

The map in the image above is actually a birds-eye view of this:

Valley of Confusion in three dimensions: not as confusing

Here you can see on the side of the block that the rocks are arranged in flat, tilted layers, not curved and folded ones. The reason they look folded on the map is that the surface is actually a valley. The numbered black and grey lines in the first image represent the elevations at different points in the valley.

This is why Visible Geology is so useful. It is an online tool that allows users to construct and view three-dimensional models of geological structures. Users start with a blank cube, then add layers to represent different rocks. They can manipulate the layers by tilting them, folding them, or faulting them. The cubes can be rotated to allow a view of all of the sides. Users can also print their models, cut them out, and fold them up into cubes. Visible Geology is also a good example of what Seymour Papert referred to as a low floor: it is very easy to get started with, and users get results immediately. I created both of the images above in under 5 minutes using Visible Geology.

Visible Geology is particularly interesting because it began as a project by a student who was learning about geological maps and geological structures. He happened to have programming skills in MATLAB which allowed him to build visualizations to help himself and his peers. From there, he developed Visible Geology into an online tool.

The goal of Visible Geology is to make it easy to visualize the three-dimensional structures formed by rocks. The lament I hear most often from my first-years is, “I just can’t see it!” Visible Geology solves that problem by allowing students to explore different configurations and scenarios. It is engaging because it has an interface that is user-friendly: it is colourful, it’s functions are intuitive, and it is not at all intimidating (unless you find large buttons with pastel-coloured illustrations intimidating). Students can learn from Visible Geology by experimenting, but would also benefit by attempting to reproduce the geological maps and structures in their assignments.

The Old: Blinkie Computes

Blinkie (The National Semiconductor Quiz Kid)

At some point in the early 1980’s, I received a National Semiconductor Quiz Kid as a gift. This toy (henceforth referred to as Blinkie) was a calculator that looked like an owl. Blinkie didn’t work like a regular calculator, though. When you entered a mathematical operation (“4 + 3 =”) he calculated the answer, but he wouldn’t tell you what it was. You would have to supply the answer. If your answer were correct, he would blink a green LED eye at you. If it were wrong, he winked a red LED eye. Blinkie came with a book of math questions, and was intended as a drill tool for children learning their pluses, take-aways, timeses and divide-bys.

I’m sure Blinkie was effective as a math teaching tool (I can add, after all), but that isn’t my main recollection of Blinkie. I liked Blinkie because the keys made a satisfying click when you pressed them. I liked Blinkie because if you turned out the lights and hid under the covers, then covered his eyes with your thumbs, the red eye would glow through your thumb, but the green one wouldn’t. Most of all, I liked Blinkie because I could use him to check my math homework, and not feel that I was cheating. So, although Blinkie was intended to teach me math (and perhaps save my mom some time making flash cards), his most substantial benefit was to reduce my anxiety. Once you do that, the math comes a lot easier anyway.

Blinkie Versus the Internet (or, Bringing An Owl To A Gunfight)

Comparing Blinkie to Visible Geology is not like comparing apples to oranges. Comparing apples to oranges is much easier than finding characteristics that Blinkie and Visible Geology share. They are very different tools.

For one thing, their approaches are very different. Blinkie was a tool for practicing math skills. He told you whether you got the answer right, or whether you got it wrong. Visible Geology is about exploring. It allows the user to be creative, and to experiment risk-free. It is about “what if?”

The motivation for creating these tools was also very different. I suspect that at least some of the motivation for building Blinkie was that new microprocessors had been developed, and that development had to be funded commercially. National Semiconductor had a hammer, and was looking for a nail. In contrast, Visible Geology was created by someone who experienced a need for a visualization tool, and built what he needed.

The most obvious contrast is the difference in technology, but it is also the least relevant. Blinkie is old technology, but back in the early 1980’s, he was pretty cool… heck, anything with lights and buttons was cool back then. The point is, he did his job, and I didn’t feel that I was missing out on anything. Today, as amazing as Visual Geology might be to a Blinkie-era person, it is nothing special technologically to the eighteen- to twenty-year-olds that I usually deal with. It does its job.

I was excited to discover both of these technologies, but for different reasons. Those reasons are related to context. I faced Blinkie as a learner. Blinkie was novel, and so was math. He and math were intertwined in a new tactile and visual experience. As far as I was concerned, Blinkie wasn’t for teaching me math, he was entertainment, and I just happened to be learning math at the same time. My perspective on Visible Geology is as a teacher. It is a tool that I’m excited about because it fills a definite need that my students have to see the three-dimensional structures they are working with. When I play with it, the purpose is to create a teachable object. There isn’t the same element of novelty and discovery as there was with Blinkie, back when math was something new.

I think that for my students, Visible Geology will be a Blinkie experience. They are discovering geology, and Visible Geology will be entertainment inseparable from learning. They can use it as a way to “check their homework” by comparing their expectations with the results of combining geological structures with different surfaces. It may even lessen the anxiety they feel when geological maps just aren’t making sense. Nevertheless, there is one thing they will be missing: Visible Geology will never make their thumbs glow.

Generally I would say no, but I’ve tried to make an exception with a new video project.
A recent onslaught of assignments highlighted the futility (yet again) of what amounts to grading the textbook. My brain started churning out cartoons about the ridiculous ways students attempt to skirt the requirement of having to answer in their own words. Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if…” came to mind, and my productivity screeched to a halt: “It might not be in your own words if…” (Does that make Jeff Foxworthy my muse?)

The point was to get students thinking about plagiarism without taking a “thou shalt not” approach. I plan to build additional resources, including a video and/or handout with tips on how to answer in one’s own words. I like to point out that the textbook is one way to say something, but not the only way, and not necessarily the best way. And it isn’t about some pedantic exercise in avoiding a specific set of words- it’s about turning words on a page into knowledge… and that doesn’t happen unless you think about what those words mean.

This project is shorter than my last project, which could make the difference between students watching it and not. Another difference is that it consists of text, music, and my own drawings… so no fifteen takes required to get a voice-over without stumbling or stuttering. The drawings were the fun part. While I have at some pont generated drawings and paintings that look like actual objects and people in the real world, doing so quickly and consistently is another matter. I came up with scribble people after searching for examples of line figures that others have drawn, and then doing my best to create something else. At one time I would have opted for stick figures, but after discovering Randall Munroe’s brilliant webcomic, xkcd… well, you wouldn’t try to out-drip Jackson Pollock, now would you?

In the process of making this video, I learned some things that might come in handy for anyone trying a similar project.

Timing

If you’ve made the slides, then you know way more about them than a first-time viewer will, so you’re probably not the best judge of how fast the slides should move along. What worked great was having someone else advance through the slides using the “Rehearse” mode under the “Slideshow” tab in PowerPoint. This records the duration over which each slide is viewed. Not only did I get an idea of how much time viewers might need, it became very clear which slides would benefit from a redesign. Set the intervals for transitions between slides, and run it with “Use Timings” selected. Then it is a simple matter of starting and ending a screen recording.

Music

I am not musically astute. If you ask me about Country and Western music released between 1950 and 1969, or Tom Waits, or Leonard Cohen, I might be able to help you. Lyrics to “The Battle of New Orleans?” Got you covered. Otherwise, you’d best ask my husband, who has a much larger musical vocabulary, and likes to ask me “Who sings this?” when he knows full well I can’t answer. But I needed music, so what to do?

Where to get it

I learned that there is a lot of royalty-free music online, and a subset of that is free royalty-free music. There is the Free Music Archive, which, amongst other things, has recordings from Edison cylinders! How cool is that?! I also found Kevin MacLeod’s website, where he offers his music under a Creative Commons license. His music is searchable by genre as well as by “feel” (bright, bouncy, driving, mysterious, etc.). Each song comes with an excellent description, suitable for the musically challenged, which makes it clear what an appropriate context would be for that song.

How to use it

Odds are, your song and your video won’t be the same length. If the song is longer than your video, it is easy enough to fade out the volume at a convenient spot. If the song is shorter, it’s more difficult to maintain continuity. Some songs come with versions that are suitable for looping, or in versions of different lengths. You can buy a little extra time by delaying the start of the song slightly, and fading in the volume, and then fading out the volume at the end. You could perform audio surgery and create a Frankensong… but if amputating musical body parts and stitching them back together again isn’t for you, then throwing continuity out the window might be the better choice. I didn’t know any of these things when I started, and it took a lot of experimenting to get something I could live with. Hopefully villagers with pitchforks and torches won’t be a problem.